Successful landing on the Sun Grid

Unfortunately in these days I'm pretty busy and I don't have the time for extensively blogging - but I'm happy to say that Mistral, the imaging engine designed for extreme scalability from the multi-core up to the Grid, has been run successfully for the first time on the Sun Grid. :-) It was really exciting to look at the logs and see that the application was scheduled on 102 CPUs 8-). The testcase for the run was the Pleiades project, an image processing prototype for the amateur astrophotographer, based on JAI (the Java Advanced Imaging API by Sun).

It took a few months to run our first test because of legal restrictions - we had to find a US resident to submit the job to the Grid as access is forbidden in the rest of the world (and we thank our friend Renzo Borgatti for joining us).

But it was an extreme satisfaction, considering that the prototype was only run in emulators until today - a kill at the first shot. ;-)